It's hard work for grassroots candidates to get valid signatures on petitions, as I discovered when I volunteered to do so.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a story about how difficult it is for grassroots candidates to get on the ballot in New York State, thanks to election laws written by, you guessed it, incumbent officeholders who don't like challenges from, you guessed it, grassroots candidates.

Former State Sen. Hiram Monserrate beat his girlfriend and stole money from the public. But HE'S still on the ballot for City Council!

(Craig Warga/New York Daily News)

The main requirement for getting on the ballot is to collect hundreds of signatures from registered voters in the district. It's difficult, painstaking, hot, sweaty work (to see what it's like, I collected signatures for Cristina Furlong, a candidate for City Council in the 21st District of Queens, which led to this difficult, painstaking, hot, sweaty video.

Every candidate for any citywide office needs to get these signatures — 450 in the case of Council members. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's not easy getting what pols call "clean" signatures, so candidates typically get three- to five-times as many as they need so their opponents won't be inclined to challenge the validity of those signatures.

But well-funded (read, party machine) candidates do it anyway — which brings us to Tuesday.

I'll focus on the 21st District because it's a perfect microcosm of the idiocy of New York's ballot process (and more evidence why New York State leads the nation in election litigation). On Tuesday, three of the grassroots candidates for the open seat — Erycka Montoya, Yonel Sosa and the aforementioned Furlong — were booted from the ballot on the grounds that they had not submitted the required 450 signatures.

Montoya had filed 1,086 —more than twice the required number. Furlong handed in 749 and Sosa handed in 732. Those numbers should have been enough to get their names on the September Democratic primary ballot, especially given how ridiculous the rules can be.

But there's another fact of New York political life: there are two other candidates for the 21st District seat: Assemblyman Francisco Moya, the aforementioned party hack; and Hiram Monserrate, a former state Senator (and convicted criminal).

Cristina Furlong is a neighborhood activist — but she was tossed from the ballot by a Queens party machine pol.

(Christie M Farriella/for New York Daily News)

Moya wants to run one-on-one against Monserrate — because, by comparison to Monserrate, who beat his girlfriend and stole money from the public, Moya is Thomas Jefferson. So it's no surprise that Moya's staffer Aridia Espinal did the dirty work by challenging the signatures of all the grassroots candidates — leaving only Monserrate on the ballot as of Tuesday. (Espinal did not return my call.)

Let's get this straight: Our campaign system allows a party stalwart (Moya) to clear the ballot of all challengers (Furlong, Montoya, Sosa) so that he can run against a convicted felon (Monserrate).

How does that serve the voters?

I wanted to ask Moya, but his campaign spokesman wouldn't put me on the phone with the lawmaker, preferring to respond in platitudes about how Espinal was merely defending democracy from candidates that don't meet the requirements. And of course, that's true on the face of it. But the spokesman didn't respond to my contention that those requirements are, in fact, set by officeholders and enforced by squadrons of their well-paid lawyers.

"The Moya campaign worked diligently to meet the modest requirements (for) ballot access and because of this hard work, we were able to secure five times the minimum requirements (of signatures)," said the campaign spokesman Jon Greenfield of the outside political firm, Red Horse Strategies. "These are requirements that everyone must abide by. Everyone should be required to play by the same rules. This is the democratic process. It ensures that community voices are heard."

A staffer for party-picked Council candidate Assemblyman Francisco Moya (above) has knocked three challengers off the ballot.

It actually does not. The seat would not even be open had not Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras-Copeland bowed to the Queens machine and opted not to run for re-election— a decision she "made" just one week before candidates could start collecting petition signatures. Monserrate, who was planning to run regardless of Ferreras-Copeland's decision, and Moya, who is an incumbent lawmaker, were already pulling the levers of their well-established campaign apparatuses, so it wasn't a big challenge for them to get thousands of signatures. But just to be on the safe side, Moya had his henchwoman challenge the other candidates' petitions.

As someone who collected signatures in parks and sidewalks all over the 21st District, I can testify —and will on Aug. 8, when Furlong's appeal will be heard! — that very few voters know anything about how a candidate even gets on the ballot, let alone each voter's civic duty to sign petitions to ensure that there are a multitude of candidates running in every election, not just party insiders and criminals who know how the game is played.

"These petition challenges are an attack on democracy," Furlong told me, citing the flawed way that signatures are collected in the first place — with volunteers (like me!) accosting people on the street and begging them to sign a paper. "People hand out fliers for massages and cheap pizza on the street. It's no place to decide who gets on the ballot."

Well, it's certainly better than a Board of Elections hearing room, as Furlong found out Tuesday.